


Facts About the Moon

by Nanoochka



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, M/M, References to internalized Homophobia, artist steve feels, implied dissociative disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-23
Updated: 2014-06-23
Packaged: 2018-02-05 20:42:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1831603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nanoochka/pseuds/Nanoochka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barnes sees him sketching birds in the back garden or doodling caricatures on napkins, even idly tracing shapes and patterns in the margins of the morning newspaper while he sips his coffee. Steve doesn’t bother to hide the sketchbooks filled with innocuous subjects or half-drawn comic panels, not even the ones containing profiles of Wilson or Agent Romanova, nor those of Agent Carter or their old compatriots from the war. Those he leaves strewn about for anyone to find, hiding in plain sight.</p><p>Never Barnes, though; never Bucky. His rendering is as utterly absent from Steve’s sketches as the Winter Soldier is from history.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Facts About the Moon

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is ample proof that it takes a freaking village. My sincere thanks go out to [Nat](http://febricant.tumblr.com), [Etharei](http://etharei.tumblr.com), [Neenya](http://neenya.tumblr.com), and [Languisity](http://languisity.tumblr.com) for the truly epic amount of hand-holding and encouragement it took for me to see this through from start to finish. It wouldn't have happened without them cheering me on and offering very necessary feedback. 
> 
> Thanks also, a million times over, to my heroic betas, [Chai](http://dirtydirtychai.tumblr.com) and [R.C.](http://rcmclachlan.tumblr.com)
> 
> The artwork was originally posted to my blog [here](http://nanoochka.tumblr.com/post/88125214935/bucky-1936-from-the-personal-collection-of). Come say hello while you're there!
> 
> Title from Dorianne Laux.

 

 

_“You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.”_

\- Denise Levertov

 

 

He finds them, in the end, beneath a false bottom in Steve’s bedroom dresser, second drawer down from the top, couched under neat rows of white undershirts so crisp they look like the folded flags of a soldier’s burial.

As hiding spots go, it’s quite a premeditated choice for a man who supposedly cannot tell a lie. Work went into this, and care, and it’s almost a pity it wasn’t more of a challenge to unearth its whereabouts. A small, unexpected part of Barnes is fondly amused at Steve’s lack of originality. Maybe it’s a sign Steve wanted him to find him out, but that isn’t a thought Barnes entertains for long. Steve is an open book in nearly every way, just not in this. If he’s bad at hiding things, it’s because he’s never had any real reason to before.

Everyone has secrets, though, even the most upstanding folks; even Captain America. While this fact surprises Barnes not at all—Steve might be superhuman and a living legend to boot, but he’s still just a man—what he finds isn’t what he honestly expected.

After years of secrets being kept from him and having none of his own, he knows well enough the things people like to hide, whether for leverage or personal gain, or just to protect themselves or what—or whom—they love. Even happiness, sometimes, if they’re scared enough it might be taken away. It figures. Only Steve Rogers's deepest, darkest secrets could manage to be as blithely innocent as the rest of him, and it’s something of an unexpected relief to Barnes that Steve remains so steadfastly wholesome, even in the things he most wants hidden from the world. It’d be sickening if it weren’t so predictable, if it weren’t the cornerstone around which Barnes's entire life is currently built.

There are at least two dozen of them: thin, battered brown notebooks organized by the dates scrawled on each cover, faded ink spelling out over a decade between the years 1929 to 1944. Steve would have been ages twelve to twenty-six, Barnes calculates absently. (He imagines the excitement that would brighten Steve’s face to hear him recall these facts so easily, but he memorized the details in Steve’s file the first time he saw it: Steven Grant Rogers, DOB July 4, 1917, Brooklyn, NY. That’s not memory; that’s something else.) Barnes would have been fourteen; later, he would have been twenty-four and MIA on the Front, and after that, he would have been nothing, unmade.

The feel of the rough paper notebook covers beneath his flesh-and-blood fingertips draws Barnes back to the present; he runs them over the dark blue scrawl of Steve’s name, the sepia blossom of water damage in one corner. Flips through the rest clinically. There are fewer notebooks towards the end; from 1945, the year Steve went under the ice, none at all.

In places there are gaps, too, jumps that span months, sometimes up to nearly half a year. The missing chapters tell a story of lost time, lost work, or both. Lost inspiration, maybe, but Barnes is just guessing there. His memories are no help to him in this matter; they are a trail of breadcrumbs leading him out into the deepest depths of the forest of his mind, only to disappear once he’s lost himself in a whirlwind of dreams and flashbacks with no narrative or logic, images that could be real or imagined but he hasn’t a clue which. They’ve led him this far, but from here on out, the way forward is as obscure as it’s ever been.

And yet, it doesn’t ever occur to Barnes that the books are anything but what they are—not journals or a record of other people’s secrets, because Steve isn’t the type to keep a tally—but sketchbooks. He wonders if a part of him didn’t know all along what he’d find, if the missing pieces of his memories were just waiting for the right nudge to fall into place.

Logically, it fits. When he isn’t off saving the world, working out, or suffering through meetings with the new director of S.H.I.E.L.D., Steve is constantly drawing. Even Barnes's vaguest remembrances of the time before always place him with pencil in hand, brow furrowed slightly in concentration while he draws. Barnes sees him sketching birds in the back garden or doodling caricatures on napkins, even idly tracing shapes and patterns in the margins of the morning newspaper while he sips his coffee. Steve doesn’t bother to hide the sketchbooks filled with innocuous subjects or half-drawn comic panels, not even the ones containing profiles of Wilson or Agent Romanova, nor those of Agent Carter or their old compatriots from the war. Those he leaves strewn about for anyone to find, hiding in plain sight.

Never Barnes, though; never Bucky. His rendering is as utterly absent from Steve’s sketches as the Winter Soldier is from history.

Without ego or expectation, Barnes can’t quite fathom why. Too many times, he has caught Steve staring at him from behind his sketchpad, always quick to look shiftily away when they accidentally make eye contact. His gaze twists Barnes up inside, rends something deep behind his breastbone and shortens his breath, a different kind of pain from what he’s used to. But it’s nothing unfamiliar; it overlaps with the half-rendered images that flash behind his eyelids, sometimes, of a different Steve looking him that way, a boy with narrow shoulders and breath that rattled out of his chest after a fight, head barely reaching Bucky’s collarbone.

That boy is long gone, but Steve hasn’t _stopped_ looking at him, it seems, not since he was small and powerless and full of hope, not since the first time they faced each other on a bridge as Captain America and Winter Soldier, but his rapidly moving pencil across the page gives him away far more than his lingering glances ever could.

The thought of Steve drawing him, of finding his own face staring back at him from a casually discarded sketchbook upon the kitchen table, has filled Barnes with an odd sense of apprehension at the feelings it might dredge up; Barnes has _braced_ himself for this moment, of the realizations it might bring. Clarity, maybe, but that’s probably too much to hope for, a golden ticket he should know better than to put any amount of faith in.

It’s a moment that never came, anyway. His heart was in his throat the first time he ever opened one of Steve’s sketchbooks, and Barnes had reeled with a sharp surge of vertigo at the thought of what he would see, only to crash back to earth when he found himself staring at a rough drawing of the hammock out back.

His fingers hover at the edge of the cover, unsure. He never hesitated to pull a trigger before he remembered Steve’s face. Never felt regret, neither, nor self-reproach, but everything seems to hit him at once now, and Barnes falters, balks. A distinctly queasy feeling settles in the pit of his gut that he might not be built for the kind of moral quandary opening a book presents.

That the books are in Steve’s bedroom notwithstanding, it’s clear no one is supposed to know these exist, least of all Barnes. Quite possibly, no hiding place was necessary until he came along, but he’s been upsetting the order of things since the day he showed up on Steve’s doorstep. What a sight he must’ve been then, hair unwashed and stringy, beard beginning to creep past his chin. He found his way back to Steve hungry and alone and hunted and confused, a man with no identity except for those other people had branded him with over the years. Sergeant. Winter Soldier. Laboratory test subject. Assassin. Asset. Spectre. Enemy of the State. Defected HYDRA operative. A broken soldier. Man out of time. James Buchanan Barnes.

Bucky.

There’s no telling which is right anymore, if he is all of them at once or none at all. If existence is conditional upon a sense of self, then perhaps he is  nothing more than a ghost, if in fact he was ever anything more.

He opens the book.

His mistake hits him at once, but like a pull of the trigger, can’t be taken back. For a moment, he reels and wonder if he might pass out.

Remorse is an emotion he’s still learning to navigate alongside all the other delicate particularities of this new-old life of his, a careful balancing act between knowing when to feel it and how not to feel it _all the time_. From the start, searching Steve’s quarters was crossing a line, even more so than all the past attempts on his life or that of his friends, the dozens of other lives Barnes has cut short. But the turn of a page brings it home. He is under no orders now, no one to blame but his own dogged need to _know_. Perhaps that’s something for which he should be grateful, that he should remember how to need anything at all, but Steve has been the only constant variable amidst the chaos, his only friend. This is a transgression for which guilt is the only appropriate response.

In these pages, Bucky is everywhere; this is where he lives.

Barnes doesn’t quite know how long he stands there, staring. After a several moments, he draws a breath, exhales, and hears it shudder out of him; he breathes in again sharply when for a moment it seems as though he can’t even feel his own lungs expand and contract. There in smudged pencil renderings is a perfect rendering of his own face, expression stripped, vulnerable. His eyes are large and solemn as he gazes back at the artist. At Steve. Did he honestly ever look this young? The date at the bottom reads 1936. Bucky would’ve been nineteen, full of life and completely ignorant to the horrors he’d be subjected to before he hit thirty.

His eyes burn until he remembers to blink. He has no memory of being this man. Smiling this smile. Still, the sight of it makes him feel like he’s drowning, caught beneath a wave and breathing in seawater.

When his right hand shakes too badly, he balls it into a fist and turns the page with his left, metal gleaming and stark against the yellowed sketchbook paper.

Page after page, they’re all the same. Bucky smiling, Bucky laughing, Bucky with his eyes soft and full of affection, warmth shining out of him like a beacon. Barnes doesn’t fathom, can’t remember who those looks might’ve been for, but as soon as he thinks it, he realizes he _does_ know. Because if there’s anyone he might one day smile again for, it’s—

In many, he is asleep. In some, angry, face like a thunderstorm. These Barnes remembers more readily, recalls standing with his fists up between Steve and a gang of bullies in an alleyway, fierce and protective as a lion. He sees himself drawn in an army dress uniform and every line on the page is simultaneously proud and heartbroken. Unexpectedly, something twists in Barnes's chest, some unknown place he perhaps had a name for once before HYDRA carved it out, so that he flinches and has to close the book.

Barnes doesn’t know what it makes him feel, how anything makes him feel. He doesn’t know what he _wants_ to feel. He’s too busy trying to relearn what it means to feel anything at all.

This, though. This makes his throat feel like it’s filling up with sand.

Barnes goes backward through the sketchbooks until his own face becomes less easily recognizable, softened by youth. He is seventeen, he is fifteen, he is twelve. He’s a stranger to his own eyes but clearly not to Steve’s, whose gaze has never wavered.  

He tries to imagine what it must be like to know something so unerringly as Steve knew him, to know something that hasn’t been burned into you, and just like that, the memory comes to him when he reaches for it like it’s always been there. Sometimes they hit him like a closed fist or shake him awake at night, but this returns like something he merely set down in another room and found again when it was least expected.

Barnes has never picked up a pencil in his life with the intention of creating art, but he knows, with sudden, absolute certainty, that he could draw Steve from nothing but the images in his mind. He memorized the sweep of Steve’s staggeringly long eyelashes at age fourteen, the fullness of his lower lip and uptick of his smile long before that. No wonder the Soldier recognized him, pulled him from the black wasteland of his memories the way he dredged Steve up from the bottom of a river. If Steve’s gaze has never wavered from him, then Barnes has always been looking right back. Even when he didn’t know who or what he was looking for.

“Buck, wha—what are you doing in here?”

Steve’s voice reaches him from the doorway, a soft exhalation that sounds as though it’s been punched out of him. Barnes doesn’t flinch, doesn’t have it in him to register surprise, but his stomach drops at the realization that he never heard Steve’s approach, has no idea how long he’s been standing there.

When he turns is when Steve gets a good look at what Barnes holds in his hands; he sees it happen, watches the colour drain from Steve’s face. He’s fresh from a run, and faint patches of sweat show through at the neck and beneath the arms of his T-shirt. But rather than looking pleasantly flushed with exertion, he’s white as a sheet.

“How did you find those?”

“I needed to see,” Barnes says, which isn’t the right answer or even an answer to the question he was asked, but he doesn’t think Steve cares one way or another _how_ Barnes did anything, just that he did. Steve is forever asking him what he wants, if he wants food or to sleep or to come for a run with him, if he wants to remember, if he wants to become the man Steve needs him to be. So he adds, “I wanted to.”

Barnes has seen Steve blush before, plenty of times, but this is maybe the most distinctly uncomfortable he’s ever looked. He refuses to come closer, Barnes notices, remaining stubbornly situated in the doorway. He folds his arms across his chest, closing himself off, and looks as though he’s trying to make himself smaller, like he wants very badly to give back every inch and pound he gained in becoming Captain America.

“You weren’t supposed to know,” he tells Steve, gently as he knows how. Probably, it comes out sounding unapologetic, but Barnes realizes that could be because he isn’t actually sorry. Just sorry he got caught. “I was going for discretion, but this was sloppy of me.”

Something complicated goes through Steve’s expression, incomprehension followed by a tightening of his mouth. “Going for—” he begins, but ends up throwing his arms up instead.

The gesture ends with him raking his hands through his hair, and for a moment, he turns his back to Barnes and simply stands there in the doorway, not looking at him. Barnes waits him out, knowing a stall when he sees it, and when Steve finally faces him again, his edges seem less frayed. Less _visible_ , Barnes corrects himself.

“You could’ve asked me, Bucky, okay?” Steve says, sounding more mulish than stern. “A man’s bedroom is his sanctuary; you can’t just barge in.”

At that, Barnes resists the urge to cock one corner of his mouth up in a half smile. One of the first things Steve told him, when Barnes had only just stumbled his way back into his life, was how the two of them used to share the lone bedroom in their shitty Brooklyn walkup, and isn’t it amazing how different life is now? Isn’t it amazing how things change?

Barnes remembers, too, what Steve didn’t say—how they’d sometimes share a single bed for warmth after the electricity got shut off. Maybe he’d assumed that was a detail lost, like so many others, to the Soldier’s programming, but Barnes can recall with almost perfect clarity the coldness of Steve’s feet in the night, the way he used to try to worm them between Barnes's calves for warmth. And more recently, maybe not on the first night or the second, but definitely by the third, Steve had offered to line the couch cushions up on the bedroom floor so that Barnes could have his bed, murmuring, uselessly, “Just like old times, Buck.”

It wasn’t just like old anything, but he hadn’t had the wherewithal to argue. Still doesn’t, some days, but Barnes knows well enough now to catch the feeble lie in Steve’s words. He’d shared his personal sanctuary with Bucky along with everything else. If Barnes remembers that much, there’s sure as hell no way Steve doesn’t also.  

“Somehow I don’t think this is a question you woulda been too forthcoming in answering,” he answers instead, inflecting the necessary amount of glibness into his voice. It comes more and more naturally to him each time he does it to shape his mouth around the same type of inflection Bucky speaks with in his dreams.

He’s sure Bucky would’ve taken it a step further, ribbed Steve until all was forgotten and they were wrestling on the floor like a couple of puppies, or he’d have added something like, _Christ, Stevie, when didja get to be such a peeping Tom?_ or _Could ya be any more in love with me, huh? Ya big sap._

But Barnes isn’t there yet; these are words that find their way into his thoughts but never quite know how to make it past his lips. With each day, it begins to feel less and less like a role he’s been forced into and more like remembering how to play a song through sheer muscle memory. Or maybe that’s just the feeling he gets around Steve when he lets the Bucky come through in his speech, the swift swoop of his stomach at Steve’s smile when Barnes sasses him back, when the “jerk” goes unsaid at the end of a sentence.

Apparently it’s enough, though, for now. Steve unfolds his arms and moves farther into the room, huffing out, “God, you’re such a punk,” as he tries to snatch the sketchbook out of Barnes's hands.

It’d be so easy to let him, to let all this go and pretend none of this ever happened. Barnes thinks Steve would prefer it, to have his sketchbooks be tucked back away and never spoken of again. Barnes realizes he’d like to give him that, make it simpler. But something inside him seizes up, resists, and he finds himself reaching out. Triggers can’t be un-pulled, he reminds himself,  and he’s come this far already.

In middair, he snatches up Steve’s hand before he can reach the sketchbook, and Steve’s mouth falls open on a quiet note of surprise when Barnes blocks the way forward with his body.

Meeting Barnes's gaze, expression startled and exposed, Steve says, “Buck,” gently, and flicks his eyes down to where Barnes’s metal fingers encircle his wrist. It’s the same voice he used on the bridge or in the helicarrier, softly pleading, willing himself to sound steadfast rather than betrayed.

He tests against the resistance a little and finds Barnes unwilling to budge. He might be strong, but not even his force of will is stronger than that arm. The metal plates whir and shift as Barnes tightens his grip; mostly he’s learned how to ignore the sound, but sometimes, like now, it’s a reminder of what hasn’t changed about him.

“What was I supposed to say?” he asks somberly, not letting go of either the sketchbook or Steve’s wrist. The question—or maybe his tone, or everything together—seems to unsettle them both, and Steve’s brows knit together tightly even as he refuses to drop Barnes’s gaze. “Was I supposed to say, ‘Hey, Steve, I think I might be remembering more stuff from before HYDRA stole seventy years of my life, and also, did you used to draw me sometimes while I was sleeping?’ Is that what you were hoping to hear?”

This time, when Steve tries to shake himself free, Barnes feels the desperation in it. He takes pity and lets him go.

The tips of Steve’s ears are bright, furious red. “It’s not about what I did or didn’t want to hear,” he snaps. “The point is that I’ve gone out of my way to show that I trust you, and you didn’t even try not to invade my privacy.”

Barnes can’t hold in his strangled laugh at that. “And I have no idea how that feels, huh? Every private thought I ever had, they plucked outta my head. Sorry if failed to show the appropriate amount of respect for the notion, Cap.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s right to turn around and do it to the guy who’s trying to help you.”

At that, a muscle tics furiously in Barnes's cheek; he can feel it. Holding up the sketchbook, he lets it fall open to a random page so that Steve can see why he doesn’t get to take the moral high ground in this conversation or pretend like he just walked in on something he had no part in.

He asks, “You call this helping? Trust, Steve? Hiding yourself from me, hiding the parts of the past that might be embarrassing to you, when I don’t have a single damn secret left of my own?”

“I’m not embarrassed about anything,” Steve grits out, and Christ, he’s still as terrible a liar as ever.

Barnes feels the heat rise to his own cheeks as soon as the thought occurs to him; that might be the most Bucky-like thing he’s ever said in his own head. It’s happening more and more these days. He doesn’t know whether to feel glad about that or not.

“My entire life is sitting right here in these books,” he says, voice pitched low so it doesn’t crack. “The parts I remember, the parts I don’t, it doesn’t matter. You kept all of it. And you didn’t think I might want to _know_?”

This time, when Steve makes to snatch the sketchbook back out of Barnes's hand, he succeeds. He shuts the cover on Bucky’s smiling face and shoves it roughly back into the drawer with all the others. “This doesn’t belong to you,” he says angrily.

 _Let him keep it_ , Barnes thinks, and barely manages to tamp down on the urge to lash out with his fists, his anger. But ever since he got his voice back, he’s learned there are so many more ways to do violence than with knives or guns or his body. “No? And who does it belong to, huh? _You_?”

For a moment, Steve’s face crumples, but he gets himself under control and shutters his expression so fast that Barnes wonders if he hasn’t been rubbing off on Steve as much as the other way around.

“I’m done with this conversation,” Steve informs him, decisive, or a fair parody of it. He reaches around Barnes to slam the dresser drawer closed but refuses to meet his eyes in the process. His shoulders are hunched, guilty like a kicked dog, but naturally, he doesn’t let that deter him. “Stay out of my stuff.”

“Never knew you to run from a fight,” Barnes calls out at his retreating back, and Steve’s steps falter momentarily until he stops outright with his hand resting upon the doorframe. Faintly, Barnes sees the tremor in his fingers, but as if he’s aware of Barnes noticing, Steve covers it up by balling his hand into a fist. When he casts a look over his shoulder, it lands somewhere in the vicinity of Barnes's knees before Steve visibly forces himself to straighten back up to his full height. Their gazes meet for a fleeting second before he turns away again.

“I already told you, Buck,” he says flatly, then lets his hand drop. “I’m not gonna fight you.”

 

+

 

Not even when his mistakes were weighted out pounds of flesh and measured in trips to the electric chair, apologies didn’t come easy. Stubbornness, it would seem, is something they could neither burn nor beat out of him despite HYDRA’s best efforts; it’s a trait that lives up to its name.

Since sunset, Barnes hasn’t moved from the leather club chair in the corner of the living room, a comfortable, worn thing with clear sightlines of the main living area and kitchen and a perfect view of the rising moon out the window. Looking at the night sky helps him, sometimes. Makes his mind go quiet—quiet _er_ —and beats the hell out of arguing with Steve when it’s clear which of them is in the wrong. That’s not pettiness, just… his nature. From a certain vantage point, he might almost find it reassuring. The quietness, though, is less old.

The Bucky of his memories rarely let a moment pass without having to fill it with words, always laughing, always joking, always good-naturedly busting Steve’s balls about one thing or another with an arm slung around his shoulder. But as the Soldier, Barnes got used to the quiet. Learned to savour it. Silence was all he knew in cryo, for years, decades, and when he was awake, if no one was talking at him or around him like he wasn’t there, it meant there was no pain to endure, no orders to accept, no reprimands to internalize. The Soldier never spoke unless spoken to, and this suited him just fine. Often it was simplest to make his mind go blank, avoid all possibility of independent thought.

During those first weeks, after the clash of returning memories and the crumbling scaffold of HYDRA programming forced Barnes to seek Steve out, he didn’t say much of anything except to give one-word answers to simple questions, and none at all if a nod or a shake of the head would do. Sometimes, he still doesn’t.

Despite appearances, it’s not out of spite. It’s not. Most of his time he spends lost in his own head, incommunicative, withdrawn; it’s worse when Steve isn’t there, when he isn’t around as a touchstone to remind Barnes why he came back, why he is trying to come back. He speaks when he has something to say, when he knows the words are the right ones.

Steve, for all he’s a man of few words, is clearly unsettled by Barnes's silences, like conversation is currency and he can’t bear to be in the red. The less Barnes has to say, the more Steve is prone to forced ramblings about the weather, the last movie he saw, Dodgers games; he cooks too much food and will watch until Barnes eats every last morsel, an acceptable excuse for him not to talk. In retrospect, Barnes should’ve anticipated Steve wouldn’t tolerate this latest impasse indefinitely.

“You ever think the moon looks different?” Barnes asks without warning. He doesn’t glance away from the window, but he can hear Steve just outside the room, hovering. He’ll have gotten the hand-wringing out of the way by now, but still, that’s unlike him not to face a situation head-on.

From the hallway, Steve stutters out an intelligent-sounding “Huh?” and then sure enough, he appears guiltily in the doorway a moment later. Barnes can’t help but smile a little at the deer-in-headlights expression written across his face, his embarrassment at having been called out.

“The moon, dumbass,” Barnes repeats. “It looks different, like someone dimmed the lights up there. You find that at all?” It’s an odd question, Barnes’ll grant him that, but it’s been hanging around in his head for a while, this odd feeling this isn’t the same sky he looked at ten or twenty or seventy years ago. Even at its zenith, the moon looks… less. It makes no sense. Stars die and the horizon changes, but not the moon. Frankly, after Steve, it’s the only thing Barnes would put any faith in that _hasn’t_ changed.

When the lamps in the room suddenly click on, obliterating his view outside with light, Barnes slits his eyes against the brightness but doesn’t flinch.

“Don’t get much time to look at the moon these days, Buck,” Steve says, a bit deadpan, but his face, as Barnes looks up to gauge his expression, is more vulnerable than exasperated. Maybe he _thwaps_ the forbidden sketchbooks down on the coffee table with a bit more force than is strictly necessary, but Barnes has gotten awfully used to Steve looking like an exposed nerve in his presence.

He pulls out a chair to straddle backwards across from Barnes. Never without a shield, he thinks, but he tilts his chin up a little in wordless acknowledgement. This is Steve’s show, so Barnes just waits for him to continue. Steve wouldn’t have come found him if he didn’t have something to say.

Sure enough, only a few moments pass before Steve tells the space between them, “Listen, Buck, I shouldn’t have gotten so sore with you earlier. You were right. I was embarrassed and afraid of what you might think, so I got upset. Doesn’t mean it was okay for me to act like a jerk.” Finally raising his eyes to meet Barnes's, he says softly, “I’m sorry.”

Barnes’s laugh sounds like a rusty gate coming off its hinges. “Jesus Christ, Steve. First thing in weeks you’ve said to me without dissecting it to pieces beforehand or acting like you’ve got to walk on eggshells, and here you are apologizing for it.” When Steve furrows his brow, Barnes says, a bit more forcefully, “You don’t always got to be the one saying sorry, okay? Not everything is your fault.”

Steve’s smile is grateful, but with an edge of ruefulness to it. Then he scrubs a hand over his face, and the smile is gone. “There’s a hell of a lot that is, Bucky. All things considered.”

 _Some of us have done worse_ , Barnes wants to say, but he’s not looking for Steve’s reassurance or his sympathy. Bringing up the red in his ledger is the fastest way to turn this conversation in the wrong direction, end up with both of them feeling worse than when they started.

“Not even you can try to take credit for the shit I’ve done,” he says instead with a glibness he doesn’t feel, then adds, “If I hadn’t broken into your room in the first place, you wouldn’t have had any reason to act like a jerk, so I guess we’re even.”

“Yeah, well.” Steve pauses briefly, and Barnes doesn’t realize it’s a tactical move designed to get him to look up again until he sees the slight quirk of Steve’s mouth, full of the sad, offbeat humour Steve never possessed before or during the War. “I should know by now to expect that kinda stupid from you.”

“Only one place I could’ve learned it from,” Barnes retorts automatically, and Steve rewards him with a soft laugh, ducking his head. Used to be his hair would’ve flopped down over his forehead, but he keeps it short and modern these days, neat. Nothing like the overgrown mop Barnes acquired as a result of no one giving a shit about his hygiene or appearance for years, except to stitch him up and hose him down after missions and before they put him back into cryo.

Each lost in their own trains of thought, another silence falls, this one lengthier than the last. Barnes is prepared to wait it out. By the trench that appears between Steve’s eyebrows, he might be waiting awhile.

Steve inhales deeply, once, slowly, like he’s trying to centre himself. It’s the moment of calm before the crosshairs line up, that long, outward breath before the trigger is pulled. For a moment, Steve looks so unrelentingly beautiful Barnes almost can’t stand it.

Bucky used to stare at the curves of Steve’s lips when he talked, the stark elegance of his fingers curled around the stem of a pencil; he used to trace, with his thoughts, the perfect softness of Steve’s cheek where it lay against the threadbare pillow on their bed. Without meaning for them to, Barnes feels his fingers twitch, stretching outward before he pulls them back into a fist. He has been trying to put a name to this feeling ever since he dove into the Potomac after Steve, but he didn’t truly appreciate how compromised he is until this very second.

Then Steve opens his eyes, tilts his head consideringly and the axis of Barnes’s world along with it. He says, “I didn’t want you to get the wrong impression about things,” and smooths his hand down the cover of the sketchbook on the top of the pile, maybe unconsciously, as though there could be any doubt what he’s referring to.

Barnes falters. “The wrong impression,” he parrots back.

The smile Steve gives him is a bit tired. It makes the lines at the corners of his eyes stand out more prominently, and sometimes it’s so obvious this is a man who’s been around for almost a century, not just the twenty-odd years he wears on the outside. Barnes must look damn near going on a thousand by comparison.

But Steve’s legendary patience doesn’t seem to be in danger of waning. “It’s hard to tell, sometimes, what you remember about the past and what you don’t. You keep stuff so close to the chest—”

“Close to the _chest_? Are you fuckin’—”

“I know, I know.” Steve holds up his hands. “I’m just talking about how things look from my end, alright? Some days I could swear the old Bucky is standing right in front of me and is about to call me a dumb mug, and give me a—a _noogie_ , okay, and other days I feel like you don’t know me at all. You don’t have to explain yourself,” he says quickly, when Barnes opens his mouth. “That’s not what I’m trying to say. But I thought that, just in case you maybe _didn’t_ remember everything... I didn’t want you to feel… certain _expectations_ based on how you might think things were before.”

At that, Barnes falters, then ventures, “We were… What, lovers?” The statement feels all kinds of wrong on his tongue, and he shakes his head. “Are you trying to tell me we were sweethearts or something, Steve? Because that—” His voice cracks.

Oh, he recalls, sure as anything, how he—Bucky—sometimes lay awake next to a sleeping Steve, despairing over the raw, gut-deep ache he felt for his best friend, want that left him feeling like the worst kind of lowlife and pervert. But this—the thought that it might have been more? It’s a side of the equation that’s utterly new to him. Doesn’t sit right. As much as Barnes remembers about want, what he relearns with each day he sees Steve’s smiles and hurts with it, he knows people don’t long for someone the way Bucky did Steve, don’t just _agonize_ over it, not if the feelings are returned openly.

He tries to keep the emotion out of his voice, but thinks he probably fails. “I think I would’ve remembered.”

Steve all but falls over himself in his haste to respond; the chair scrapes loudly across the floor when he shoots up out of it and crosses the space between them in a single stride. Barnes blinks in surprise as Steve sinks to one knee in front of him, his upturned face naked and open, almost desperately beseeching in its earnestness.

This time Steve _does_ cover Barnes's hand with his own where it rests on his knee, though he withdraws it just as quickly, snatching it back to his side like he touched a hot stove.

“No,” he rushes out, emphatic. His eyes are wide and pleading and very blue, and Barnes is a little taken aback by his urgency. “That’s what I’m saying, Buck. We never—you _loved_ women. You were the biggest damn Casanova going. Different gal on your arm every night.”

When he looks away and pauses to draw a breath, Barnes can hear the way it shudders through him like an old, familiar asthmatic rattle. Steve must hear it too, because he shakes his head and gives a bitter-sounding chuckle Barnes suspects is aimed inward.

“The stuff in these old sketchbooks…” he begins, and grimaces. Like he’s remembering, again, the initial embarrassment of Barnes finding him out. “They say a hell of a lot more about who I am than they do about you.”

“And what exactly are they saying, Steve?”

His answer is an audible click of Steve’s throat as he swallows, and a soft “Something I wasn’t ready for anyone to see. Not yet. Maybe not ever.”

“Not even Bucky?” Barnes rephrases: “Not even me?”

Their eyes meet. “Especially not you.” Steve chuckles strangely and scrubs a hand over his face. “Fuck. _Definitely_ not Bucky.”

That hangs there a moment. The uncharacteristic curse word aside, Barnes doesn’t assume Steve is trying to be callous or bitter about his… duality of character, for lack of a better way to put it. That’s not in Steve’s nature. Besides, it’s true. Each morning, Barnes wakes up and there’s a 50/50 chance of him not knowing the guy in the mirror. And Steve… Each morning, he, too, looks as though he’s braced for any one of the many versions of Steve he might have to assume, depending on whether Barnes greets him with silence, a “good morning,” or something else entirely.

This is a new version of Steve that Barnes has yet to see, though. Maybe new to them both.

Haltingly, Steve continues, “After you… he… fell from that train, I never really pictured myself having to have this conversation. I kept on drawing because it felt like there was nothing else for me to hang on to. You were just gone. I was afraid I’d forget your face.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t.” Steve gives a half smile, the corner of his mouth quirking up. Then Barnes feels it: a soft, hesitant touch of fingers against the metallic plates of his left wrist, so faint that the sensors almost don’t pick it up. He darts his gaze over to his arm and back to Steve’s face, and Steve is already looking back at him steadily, eyes bright. “You didn’t forget mine either.”

Barnes wants to say, _Tell me how you loved him_ , because some part of him needs this. Needs it, but doesn’t know how to ask for it, nor how to close the distance and find out how all of Bucky’s most secret wishes end. He needs to know if they’re the same as his own. He thinks they might be.

Maybe it shows on his face; there’s a catalogue of Barnes’s expressions sitting on the coffee table not two feet away, and Steve knows each one intimately. He croaks out, brokenly, “Buck—” but suddenly all the air in the room is too heavy and Barnes can’t see the moon outside the window anymore.

“I need some air,” he announces abruptly, and jerks to his feet despite Steve’s quietly desperate noise of protest, his attempt to catch his wrist as Barnes brushes past him. His expression shatters, and maybe Steve can’t be blamed for thinking he’s losing his Bucky a third time because of the one thing he always tried to keep hidden. That he is destined to continue to lose him again and again, forever.

But this isn’t Barnes falling away, slipping through his fingers—it’s not Steve failing to catch him a second time. He’s running. This is him running away.

 

+

 

The view from the roof is better than the one from the window.

There are so few tall buildings in DC—especially now, with the Triskelion half-submerged in the Potomac. He’s only six stories up, leaning over the cement ledge that runs the perimeter of the roof, and Barnes can see surprisingly far, across the treetops and houses to the illuminated spire of the Washington Monument, stark against the star-speckled midnight backdrop.

It reminds him of his memories of looking at the night sky with Steve from the roof of their apartment block in Brooklyn before the war, a full moon so bright and clear his eyes felt filled up with it. Too easily, he could get lost up here, lie back in the dark and the quiet and let the rest of the world fall away, forget everything awhile. But forgetting has never done him any real good, anyway, and he’s had enough of being lost.

The truth is, he’s going stir-crazy. Barnes has no clue how long he’s been up here, but the cigarette butts are piling up at his feet as he sends curl after curl of smoke up into the air. Waiting for… what? Where he ought to be is downstairs. Downstairs, where Steve is lying awake in bed, probably, or maybe sitting exactly where Barnes left him in the living room. Analyzing, worrying, turning things over in his head again and again, because Steve, despite what he stands for in the eyes of the American people, is a thinker first and a man of action second. Always was the smart one, always three steps ahead.

But he’s not invulnerable, which Barnes knows maybe better than anyone. There’s an expression he gets sometimes when Barnes’s back is turned or Steve thinks he doesn’t notice, a particular wide-eyed blankness upon which every feeling of loss or despair seems to be written. And there’s so much of it, too much. Tonight, Barnes may have put that look there again, etched the crease between Steve’s brows that much deeper, and the thought sends a pang through him, unpleasant.

Why had he run? Steve had been looking at him like—like _that_ , the way Bucky always looked at Steve and wanted to one day find him staring back. The way Steve had been looking at him all along. Like he hung the moon, Barnes thinks, with not a little irony. Like he’s the brightest goddamned light in the sky.

Barnes sighs and drags his fingers through his hair, roughly, then throws his cigarette away with a noise of disgust, grinds it out against the cement balustrade with a metal finger. Every inch of him feels like it’s trembling, ready to shake apart, and he’s so fucking angry at himself he could scream.

“Get it the fuck together, Barnes,” he mutters. He makes to grab another cigarette from the pack, the coward’s way out, but finds it empty; with a curse, he flings the empty carton aside and pulls the arm holes of his sweater over his hands instead, jutting his chin out as he fumes silently at himself. This indecision is killing him, and now he doesn’t even have a reason left to be up here, no distractions to take his mind off what he knows he ought to do.

It’s the night before he shipped off to war, the first time he ever fired a sniper rifle, the moment he picked up Steve’s shield and flung himself at a HYDRA soldier on a speeding train. The moment before he held his breath and dove headfirst into the Potomac from a burning sky. He never experienced nervousness or ambivalence as the Soldier, not until Steve. Since then, he’s barely been able to feel anything else. Isn’t it time he made a decision? Isn’t it time Barnes did something other than let himself get pushed around—by HYDRA, by S.H.I.E.L.D., by fate, his fear of taking his own life back into his hands?

Put like that, Barnes realizes it’s surprisingly easy to make his mind up after all.

There are any number of actions written in muscle memory that don’t involve killing, proof that not everything has to feel like programming, like something that has been stripped away from him and replaced with steel, with obedience. Sometimes it’s just easier to listen than to think, to trust that flesh and bone and muscle know what his mind often does not. In the end, Barnes steels himself and lets his feet retrace their steps to the firescape, bare soles scraping against the old metal frame that creaks faintly under his weight as he climbs down one story, two, three.

At the window to Steve’s bedroom, however, Barnes stops. Where his fingers’ bright chrome gleams against the peeling white paint of the windowsill, he comes up short. One finger on the trigger, again, but this time he hesitates, eyes glued to the bright golden shine of Steve’s hair where it’s lit up by the spillover of light from the streetlamps outside.

Steve always did sleep on his side, shoulders hunched in and fists curled protectively against his chest like someone used to taking up as little space as possible. It’s surprising how easily Barnes realizes he knows this. But Steve he doesn’t climb beneath the covers anymore, doesn’t huddle beneath them as though desperate for warmth. Instead he sleeps on top of the blankets in deference to an 0500h inspection that’ll never come, the sharp hospital corners folded crisp as ever at the bottom of the mattress. At that, Barnes smirks. Can’t take the soldier out of the man.

For several moments, Barnes watches the gentle rise and fall of Steve’s shoulders as he breathes—not entirely untroubled, but mostly steady. He can’t tell from here whether Steve is asleep, though, or trying to—or just pretending either way.

Sucking in his breath, Barnes slides the window up as quietly as possible, then swings a leg over the sill and soundlessly follows with his body, dancer-smooth. His jeans don’t even whisper against the ledge. Again, he pauses, half-in and half-out. On the bed, Steve doesn’t stir, but Barnes holds still for a moment just in case, waiting. When all Steve does is continue to breathe, deep breaths in and out with the occasional hitching noise, Barnes unfolds his limbs from the windowsill and climbs the rest of the way inside.

Light on the balls of his feet, he pads over to the bed and extends a hand to touch Steve’s shoulder. He doesn’t want to startle him awake, but before he can touch the soft skin of Steve’s shoulder, he finds himself snagged around the waist and hauled onto the mattress, shoved hard on his back with a suddenly awake and mobile Steve Rogers bearing him down.

He can’t help his instincts: Barnes hooks his legs around Steve’s and shoves his hips up, getting enough leverage to flip them, but Steve seems to expect it and quickly slaps Barnes down again, this time using his full weight to pin him. A half second later, Barnes feels the sharp metal prongs of a stun gun against his throat, and he goes perfectly still except for the heaving of his chest.

It hits him that maybe Steve’s trust in his better nature isn’t quite as unshakable as he once thought. Barnes’s breath leaves him in a short huff of relief, because it’s _good_ knowing Steve is prepared for anything, but he also can’t help the way his stomach drops at the realization that Steve has, on some level, anticipated having to defend himself against Barnes in the night.

“Bucky,” he bites out, one hand firm against Barnes’s shoulder and the other unwavering where it presses the stun gun against the soft skin beneath his jaw. He shakes him a little, just enough to let Barnes know he’s not bluffing. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Not whatever you’re thinking,” Barnes answers. His voice doesn’t sound unaffected, but he tries to keep his words steady and flicks his eyes in the direction of the stun gun in a meaningful way. He absolutely doesn’t try to shove Steve off of him, even though he could if he tried hard enough, let his arm do the work for him. They both know it, so Barnes hopes Steve understands why it’s equally significant when he does nothing. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

“So you sneak into my bedroom through the window in the middle of the night?” Everything about Steve’s expression is angry, face contorted in a way that should make him look less handsome, comical even, but doesn’t. After a second, he makes a soft grumbling sound in his throat and eases up, not letting Barnes go completely but withdrawing the points of the stun gun from against his neck. Then he adds, “And sorry, but you wouldn’t have hurt me.”

Barnes huffs a little, amused despite himself, and that seems to be an acceptable cue for Steve to sit back on his heels, straddling Barnes’s legs rather than keeping him totally immobilized.

Face thawing just slightly, Steve sighs. In the dim light, hair half-flattened from the pillow and clad in nothing but a worn US Army T-shirt and an old pair of green running shorts not fit to be seen in public, he looks incredibly soft, boyish even. Too bad Barnes knows better than that.

“Okay, well, I’m awake, and I assume there’s a reason for that. What do you want?” Steve asks neutrally, if with a bit of exasperation. Barnes bites his lip and pushes himself up on his elbows.

“Just came to talk. We never really got to finish our conversation, before.”

“Oh yeah? And why is that, Buck?” With a shake of his head and a faint, sardonic laugh, Steve rolls off him and nudges Barnes to the side with his hip so there’s room for Steve to lean back against the headboard, long legs stretched out before him. He’s warm, a solid line of heat against Barnes’s side, but he makes no move to shift away. Neither, he notices, does Steve, and maybe that means something, and maybe it doesn’t. “You disappeared faster than a shot out of hell.”

No denying his exit had been a little on the dramatic side. Barnes shrugs and doesn’t attempt to refute it. He says, instead, “Sorry. Things were just getting a little… intense. I needed air.”

Steve nods. “Right. You said.” He takes a very pointed inhale and makes a face. “Seems to me like you sucked in more smoke than oxygen.”

“It’s a figure of speech, you geek. Nobody’s perfect.”

“Speak for yourself.” Smirking, Steve laughs a little at his own joke. “Dunno if you heard, but I was literally engineered to be a flawless specimen.”

“Of a gorilla, maybe.”

They both smile at each other, Steve a bit ruefully, but he doesn’t answer. After a moment, he looks down at his hands, picking idly at a hangnail that in all likelihood doesn’t exist. Like last time, a mildly uncomfortable silence falls over the room, but now it’s Barnes’s turn to fill it, not Steve’s. He almost feels sympathetic to how difficult it must’ve been for Steve earlier, because Barnes has the floor and has no damn idea what to say.

As he tries and fails to come up with something, it occurs to him that maybe talking is what’s wrong here. That’s all they’ve been doing, exclusively, since the first time Barnes broke into Steve’s room, since he started living here, even, and it’s done them an overwhelming amount of no good.

So Barnes chooses not to speak. Instead, he reaches out to cup his hand around the hinge of Steve’s jaw, then ignores the widening of his eyes and Steve’s blue irises suddenly blurry-close as he leans in and presses their mouths together. It feels right, overwhelmingly right, the second he tastes the warm sweetness of him, tests the softness of Steve’s plump bottom lip with his tongue.

Few things are ever as good as he imagines, except maybe this. For one, it’s a wholly new experience; nothing and no one has yet been able to taint this for him. Kissing Steve makes him feel like someone’s reached a hand into his chest and squeezed all the air from his lungs, and Barnes could lose himself in a thing like that. Or find himself, maybe.

He doesn’t expect Steve to cover his hand with his own, flesh-and-blood fingers warm against the cool metal of the prosthetic as he pulls it away from his face. Nor does Barnes expect him to draw back with an expression like he’s just been hit. His mouth is pursed into a small, hurt thing, chin a little red from Barnes’s stubble, and his eyes have taken on a watery look.

When he tries to pull him in close again, though, Steve braces a palm against his shoulder, gently but firmly keeping him at a distance. Just that simple action, that straightforward refusal, slaps Barnes with such a feeling of nausea that his head swims with it.

Steve stutters, “Wh—what was that?”

For a second, Barnes falters. He opens his mouth to answer but can’t find the words. Then: “What did it look like?” It comes out sounding like a storm cloud; Barnes can only imagine what his face looks like, but the embarrassment burns too hot at the back of his throat for him to, strictly speaking, give a shit.

He goes to snatch his hand back out of Steve’s grip, get the hell away from Steve’s bed and retreat to somewhere safer, maybe, but Steve’s fingers are like steel around his wrist. The irony’s not lost on him, but when Barnes glances down, all he sees is the pale skin of Steve’s forearm, muscles corded and bunched in his determination not to let go. No metal, no fancy tricks. He never did need anything much to keep Barnes around.

“Talk to me,” he says, voice barely giving way to unsteadiness. There’s a tremor, almost unnoticeable, in how he says “talk,” but Barnes knows well enough that Steve is always at his most stubborn when all the cracks are showing. A vivid blush stains his cheeks but his gaze doesn’t waver. “Bucky. Don’t you run out of here again.”

What’s the use pointing out Barnes wasn’t the first one to run away, when all this started? That he wasn’t the one to keep this swept under a rug for—hell—their entire adult lives? Maybe more? Steve may be a stubborn asshole, but at least he’s consistent.

“Just forget about it,” he grunts, glaring back. “It was a mistake.”

Steve quirks his eyebrow up, smirks like he can see right through him. “I thought you don’t make mistakes.”

For just a split second, his grip relaxes, and Barnes takes the opportunity to slap his hand away, wrenching his arm back to his chest. Childishly, he shoves Steve, hard, the butt of his palm hitting his shoulder. The force of it drives Steve back against the headboard, the wooden frame cracking against the wall.

Barnes snaps, “Jesus, Rogers—what does it matter?” but Steve just shoves him back, equally petulant.

“Asshole. You _kissed_ me,” he hisses. “I kinda think that matters a lot!”

“Not if the other guy objects, it don’t. Stop fucking rubbing it in—I got the message loud and clear.” Barnes swallows once, involuntarily, and sucks his lower lip between his teeth to stop himself from saying anything else.

Steve’s eyes go more tragic than a kicked puppy. He lifts his hand and Barnes tenses, but Steve just brushes his fingers along his cheek, nudging his hair out of the way where it’s come out of his ponytail. The touch is soft, cautious—inquisitive, maybe. But Steve pulls back as if stung when Barnes jerks his face away.

In response, Barnes sees Steve lock his expression down, jaw clenching until a muscle tics in his cheek. “Why’d you do it, Buck,” he says, voice flat. “You’re the one who came down here; you must have had a reason.”

Resignation or something like it takes the wind out of Barnes’s proverbial sails. “Because I wanted to,” he says with finality. Then he smiles using all his teeth; in actuality, it probably looks more like a grimace. “Aren’t you always telling me I should go for what I want, Steve?”

With no warning, Steve slams the flat of his hand against the headboard. Miraculously, the wood doesn’t splinter, and Barnes looks between it and Steve’s angry little face, feeling strangely amused. It’d be nothing to laugh and call him a pug, something Barnes is suddenly sure he’s done a hundred times before. Like Steve can tell what he’s thinking, he snaps, “Can you seriously not be straight with me for five seconds?”

That’s abruptly sobering. Barnes feels his face soften as he watches Steve wrestle with himself to keep his cool, the streetlights through the window casting a swath of brightness across his cheek, the muscle that jumps there like a bowstring drawn too tight. Barnes swallows. Says, with a raw honesty that frankly terrifies him, “I’m trying to, pal.”

“Then don’t bullshit me that that kiss had anything to do with what you _want_.”

Steve spits it out so viciously, with so much _hurt_ , that it takes Barnes a moment to parse what he actually said.

“... what?”

The exasperation seems to bleed out of Steve as suddenly as it came. Turning his eyes heavenward, Steve shuffles himself back against the headboard and draws his legs up to his chest, wrapping an arm around his knees.

“This is exactly what I was talking about, Bucky,” he says roughly, and gestures indistinctly, a bit wildly.

A moment later, he drags that same hand through his hair. That was always Bucky’s move, the tendency to run nervous fingers through his hair, mussing and unmussing it, mussing and unmussing while he struggled to find some semblance of order in his thoughts, half-resentful, half-admiring of Steve’s ability to look quite literally unruffled all the time, even covered in dirt and bleeding from his lip. These days, Barnes tends not to do much with his hands if it doesn’t serve a purpose; he used to forget what they were for until someone had given them a task. Now he remembers, sometimes, by watching Steve, by seeing that even the most pointless of gestures can carry significance if you know how to look.

Far from unruffled now, Steve continues, “This is why I didn’t want to have to talk about this. Because I knew you’d get the wrong kind of idea, that you’d feel _obligated_ , somehow, to—I don’t know. Reassure me, make me feel better about wanting—” He breaks off, swallows, and slants a haunted look over in Barnes’s direction. His voice is only half-mocking when he adds, “Because that’s the kinda guy you are.”

“That is _not_ the kind of guy I am,” Barnes interjects, because _really_.

Solemn, Steve meets his eyes, and he no longer looks angry or frustrated or even glib. Just tired. “When it comes to me, you are. Always were.”

In terms of total confusion, Barnes doesn’t think he’s ever been so lost in a conversation in his life. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You’re trying to remember the guy you used to be, or some version of him,” he says, and even though Barnes has no clue where he’s going with this, Steve sounds so confident that for a moment Barnes considers maybe he _is_ the one failing to understand. Steve continues, “I support you wanting to get your life back, I do, but this… this isn’t part of it, Buck. You didn’t think of me that way then, and you don’t now. And you pretending to feel something you don’t is pretty much the worst thing I can think of, okay? I’d honestly rather live out my life and die alone than have you put on some act for my benefit.”

Never mind, thinks Barnes. After listening to that, he almost wants to storm out in disgust. He doesn’t, doesn’t want to get mad at Steve when he’s obviously trying to do the right thing—what he thinks is the right thing—but he’s such a goddamned drama queen sometimes. The scoffing noise that escapes Barnes’s mouth sounds anything but polite. Even Steve raises an eyebrow at him.

“You’re a fucking idiot, Rogers,” Barnes spits, and on second thought, he _is_ going to get mad.

The element of surprise is in his favour when he lashes out, punching Steve in the sternum so hard that he tumbles sideways off the bed and hits the floor with a stunned grunt. A moment later, Barnes is on top of him, crouched over his hips with a hand against Steve’s collarbone. The way Steve gapes up at him would almost be funny if Barnes didn’t have a few very important pieces of information to impart.

“First of all,” he grates out, “give me some goddamn credit to decide for myself what I do and don’t feel, alright? I’m brainwashed, not a moron.”

Steve reels back at that, his face screwing up like Barnes just whalloped him one, but he’s far from finished.

“Secondly, maybe if you’d pulled your head out of your ass for five seconds and stopped feeling sorry for yourself, you’d have noticed how ridiculously _in love with you_ I was, ever since we were kids!” A hollow bark of laughter shakes out of him, and Barnes doesn’t even bother to try to correct himself, say “how ridiculously in love with you Bucky was” instead, because he’s not talking about himself now, right?

Or maybe, at this moment right here, he can’t tell the difference. He’s so pissed off and incredulous at Steve’s _overwhelming obliviousness_ that everything seems to be bleeding together.

“God, the way I used to moon over you,” he says, mournfully. “Could’ve made a guy sick to his stomach. We wasted so much time trying not to let ourselves get caught looking that we missed each other by a mile.”

Before Steve can think too much about it, because it’s clear from his expression how badly he wants to overanalyze the stuffing out of this, Barnes yanks him closer by the front of his shirt. He leans in until they’re close enough to kiss again, breathing hotly against each other’s faces.

The second time’s the charm, he thinks, when Steve lets himself be pulled into it, his hands lifting to bracket Barnes’s cheeks; a faintly agonized sound leaves his mouth, but he kisses Barnes back like he’s been hungry for it his whole life. Like he’s been holding his breath for seventy years and just now broke the surface of the waves.

It’s short-lived, though. This time, Barnes is the one to pull back with a scowl on his face. He twists his fist in Steve’s shirt but doesn’t go far, detaches their mouths long enough to harsh out, breathing hard, “You asshole. Don’t fucking tell me what I do and don’t want.”

Realistically, he should’ve never expected that to work. Steve never let a damn thing go his whole life if Barnes was the one saying it. He furrows his brow. “You’ve been telling me for weeks how you aren’t him, Buck. I’ve accepted that—I’m trying to accept it. But how can you suddenly say you got all these feelings when you’re not the same guy?”

“The only constant between me and Bucky Barnes is you,” he answers impatiently, like that should be obvious. And as far as he’s concerned, it is. “So, I don’t know, you figure that one out.”

Scowl softening, he lays his hand gently, reverently, upon Steve’s neck, thumb nestled into the suprasternal notch—possessively, thinks Barnes. Like it belongs there, like it’s his _right._ The contrast of bright chrome and pale skin fills him with something… something. Movement against his palm registers when Steve swallows, his Adam’s apple jumping, and Barnes wonders if Steve’s maybe a little nervous to have a former assassin’s hand around his throat. But there’s no sign of it in the look in Steve’s eyes, a calm, unwary watchfulness that makes Barnes wish he could climb inside Steve’s body and never leave, and he decides that—no. That look means something else.

Nevertheless, Barnes slides his hand up so that his thumb rests against Steve’s full bottom lip instead, just barely denting the flesh. Steve sighs. Rather than answering Barnes’s statement, he turns his head slightly to kiss the sleek pad of Barnes’s thumb, lips parting around the metal as his eyes flutter closed, eyelashes dark and impossibly long against his freckled cheek.

When he opens them again and meets Barnes’s gaze, looking intent, determined in a way he typically reserves for the battlefield, a dozen muscles tighten in Barnes’s body he hasn’t felt aware of in a long, long time.

A small groan escapes him; he dives forward to jam his lips against Steve’s. Finesse—he could give two shits about that. His thumb gets caught between them momentarily, the taste of it a metallic tang not unlike blood, until he pulls the hand back to fist it in Steve’s hair, clutching at those flaxseed strands hard enough to make Steve hiss and tip his head back, giving Barnes a better angle from which to devour him.

It’s a giddy, lightheaded feeling he gets when he licks into Steve’s mouth and Steve just _opens_ for him with a small, yearning sound, foregoing the chasteness of their earlier kisses in favour of something far more urgent, all sharp angles and need. Barnes readjusts his position to settle his forearms on either side of Steve’s head, caging him in but not letting go of his grip on his hair.

Steve, for his part, settles his hands on Barnes’s waist, fingers diving beneath the hem of his T-shirt to clench into his flesh, and now that they both seem to be on the same page, _finally_ , it almost makes Barnes’s head swim how fast they go from heady presses of lips and tongues together to Steve hitching his hips up while Barnes grinds down. Like a stream too long stoppered up by the floodgates, everything seems to want to pour out of him at once, and Barnes for one is smart enough to know when he’s got no fucking chance of swimming against the current without going under.

He’s pretty okay with going under.

Like it’s nothing, Steve sits up and manages to get to his feet without dislodging Barnes. Lifts him as easily as a sack of flour, then tumbles them both down onto the bed. He releases his grip around Barnes’s waist momentarily, sits back to find the hem of his T-shirt and pull it over his head, the frank broadness of his chest and shoulders magnificent in the moonlight, pink darkening to red where a flush has lit him up from cheeks to sternum. Barnes swallows around an alarming dryness in his mouth, but then Steve is back, biting first at Barnes’s chin, then slanting their mouths together again.

Because it’s Steve, and Steve is nothing if a little bit of a control freak, Barnes expects him to want to settle on top, pin him down and show him who’s boss. But Barnes barely gets out an “oof” as his back hits the bed before Steve is rolling them, letting himself be the one to get pressed into the mattress.

Steve doesn’t miss a beat. He slides his hands down and tugs at the back of Barnes’s sweater, impatient, until Barnes gets the message to shove it up and off over his shoulders, his head, and the smooth, impeccable skin of Steve’s torso is so very hot against his own.

When he moves to draw his arms back down from where they reach in the direction of the headboard, Steve’s stretched out alongside his, Steve links their fingers together, says, “No, like this,” and Barnes is struck so profoundly by the rawness of his voice that he can’t find it in himself to answer, only obey. He feels like he’s about to vibrate out of his own skin.

Muteness notwithstanding, Barnes is all too glad to oblige him. He releases Steve’s hands, latches onto his wrists instead so he can hold him there, arms pinned over his head, and his own not-inconsiderable size is an effective counterweight to all Steve’s Captain America bulk. There’s no one else who could be, barring a god; there’s no one else in the world like this, like _them_.

Barnes has thought about this. He wonders how Steve knew. But then Steve strains up to break Barnes’s hold, fails or doesn’t try quite hard enough to succeed, and the noise he makes is indescribable. Just like that, Barnes understands: he’s not the only one who’s wanted it. He’s never in his life been made pliant by choice, by his own submission, but looking down into Steve’s trusting, open face, he finally appreciates that there can be beauty in letting go, in asking for it.

There’s a quiet niggling at the back of his head, though. Like the fierce protective swell Bucky used to get seeing Steve midfight against a bunch of bullies in an alleyway or across a German battlefield, it holds him back before he can kiss Steve again, makes him pause.

“Is this what you want?” he asks, meeting Steve’s eyes. At the question, Steve furrows his brow, and Barnes struggles to find the right words. “I mean… like this, right now? Is that what you want.”

He’s loosened his grip on Steve’s wrists, almost without realizing it, and Steve frees himself with ease, draws his arms back down to settle on Barnes’s shoulders. Oddly, his expression turns conflicted, difficult to read, and Barnes is suddenly grateful he stopped, asked a question before he got too far to think, let alone speak.

“Is that what _you_ want?” Steve counters, hesitantly, but before Barnes can get annoyed that they’re back _here_ again, he adds, “Hey, I got just as much right to ask as you do.”

Barnes grunts his acknowledgement. Thinks a moment, fighting the urge to keep himself hidden away. He’s already as exposed as he’s going to get, here, and he reminds himself he doesn’t mind Steve seeing all the vulnerable places, his pink skin and old scars. “I want you,” he says, with deliberateness. “I... want to feel close to you.”

Steve’s expression breaks on a smile, wavering until he has to bite his lip to get his face under control. “I already feel close to you,” he says, a little shyly. “But I want that too.” He slides his hand down to rest against Barnes’s chest, fingers splayed over muscle and metal. “I want that,” he repeats, “but…” A pause, long enough that Barnes has to cock an eyebrow at him, nudging him until Steve’s smile goes crooked, rueful. “Frankly, Buck, I’m not exactly drawing on the same _breadth and depth_ of experience as you.”

“It’s like fallin’ off a bike,” Barnes says easily, smirking back at him. “I’m sure it’ll come back to you, no sweat.”

Steve shakes his head, and even in the dim room, his blush is bright against his skin. Hell, someone would notice that blush from space. “If that’s really the metaphor we’re going with, then I suppose it’d help if I’d learned to ride a bike in the first place.”

It takes a second for Barnes to parse his meaning, but he attributes that a kneejerk refusal to believe it than anything. “Wh—are you joking?”

“Wish I could say that’s the case.”

Suddenly, this is too strange a conversation to be having with Steve pinned to the bed. Barnes rolls of him to one side, and Steve goes with him, props himself up on one elbow so he’s looking down at him.

“Disappointed?” he asks, flip, and Barnes recognizes that particular smile now, the brittle, half-cocked one that doesn’t reach Steve’s eyes. He didn’t mean to hit a sore spot, but it also doesn’t seem like Steve _doesn’t_ want to be talking about it. If that were the case, Barnes is confident Steve would’ve told him to lay off in a not-so-gentle way.

Barnes says, “Shut up,” and shoves at Steve’s shoulder a little, but Steve doesn’t offer anything more. For a moment, Barnes just squints at him. Then: “Not even Agent Carter?”

A wince. “Not even her.”

“Huh.” Without meaning to, Barnes thinks, _Bucky’d be one happy hell of a sonuvabitch to hear that news_ , though it doesn’t stir any particular feeling in him except an overwhelming fondness for the big dweeb in front of him. “Christ, Stevie. Leave it to you to squander a good thing.”

“What, unlike you, who used to make sure there wasn’t a single dame in Brooklyn going _unappreciated_ six out of seven nights a week?” Gently, Steve reaches out and chucks Barnes on the chin, quiet reassurance that he doesn’t mean anything by it, and Barnes glowers at him with equal seriousness. “We already established we’ve done our fair share of squandering,” he says. “I think I’m ready to move on from there.”

Steve lets the silence hang for a while as Barnes chews his lip, considers what to say next. “It’s been a while since I last fell off that bike, myself,” he reveals, at last. The words come out measured, fraught; he wants to reel them back in even as he says them. Carefully, he meets Steve’s eyes. There’s no judgement in them. “Been even longer since it was a bike I wanted to fall off of. You know, by choice.”

This information sinks in slowly; Barnes watches it be absorbed, considered, understood. Steve’s eyes go sad, and before Barnes can tell him not to read too much into it, brush it off with a shrug and a joke, he’s being hauled in for a kiss, Steve’s arms coming around him strong and unrelenting.

It’s just a hard press of lips, no tongue, barely even sexual despite the length of their half-naked bodies pressed together, but when Steve pulls back, they’re both a bit breathless.

“Maybe let’s just lie here for a while,” Steve suggests, cradling Barnes’s jaw in one hand. “Okay?”

Again, Barnes smirks, but he thinks it comes through, how much he’d rather bury his face in Steve’s neck again, cling and never let go. “Oh yeah? That’s what you want, huh? Knew you couldn’t resist fallin’ into my eyes, you goddamn marshmallow.”

The delight in Steve’s laugh is patently unrepentant. Yeah, he knows all right, sees right through him as though Barnes were a pane of glass—a little warped, cracks running through it every which way, but still transparent as it ever was. “You got a problem with that, Barnes?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Captain.”

With their faces this close, Barnes can feel the jump of Steve’s eyebrows against his face; a grin. “Then yeah, jerk. That’s what the hell I want.”

 

+

 

Surprisingly, Barnes sleeps. Not for long, it’s never for long—it’s still dark out when he wakes, and the lamp on the bedside table is switched on—but Steve’s arms are no longer around him and the other side of the bed has gone cold. Groggy, Barnes rolls onto his back, then scrubs a hand over his face. Flips onto his other side, because he must’ve rolled away from Steve in his sleep.

Once his eyes have had a chance to adjust, he realizes Steve’s neither left the bed nor let it go cold—he’s simply shifted farther over to one side, where he’s settled himself against the headboard, sitting up with his sketchbook on his outstretched legs. Drawing. Still shirtless and clad only in the running shorts he wore to bed, he’s quite the sight. Barnes wants to get in his personal space, seal his mouth to the ridge of Steve’s naked hipbone and tongue the salt off his skin, but he also likes seeing him this way too much.

When their eyes meet, Steve smiles at him. “Hi,” he says, and stops moving the pencil. For once, he doesn’t look reluctant or embarrassed at having been caught; his expression is unshuttered, bare. There’s such a terrible amount of warmth in the slight uptick of the corner of his mouth that Barnes’s stomach clenches, a welcome sort of vertigo.

“What are you doing?” he asks in a sleep-roughened rasp, going up on one elbow.

He isn’t surprised when Steve answers, deadpan, “What’s it look like?”

“No idea, smartass.”

Holding out his hand, Barnes wiggles his fingers with impatience for Steve to hand it over. He thinks this might be it, the moment Steve finally lets him see what he sees, what he was once so afraid of Barnes knowing. _Willingly_ , Barnes adds mentally. Steve’s willingness to be seen is everything, and it hits him, then, where he went so wrong trying to get here all on his own before.

Steve’s newest sketchbook is heavier than the others, the leather cover sturdy, substantial, the pages thicker and better quality than anything he had growing up. Barnes takes a second to weigh it against his palm, fingers brushing Steve’s as he hands it off, but at Steve’s nod, his tentative smile, he pulls the sketchbook towards him and opens it to the page bookmarked with the pencil.

It’s a rough sketch of him asleep on his stomach, all raw lines and shading, but Barnes can see clearly the knot of scars at his shoulder where metal meets flesh, the dark shock of his hair, the fan of his ponytail against his back. His spine is a graceful swoop of pencil that ends in a crinkle of bedsheets about his waist, and his arms curl protectively around his pillow. Lax with sleep, the pout of his mouth and softness of his face is almost unrecognizable.

Barnes traces the sharp edge of the figure’s jaw on the page. _Bucky’s_ jaw. “This—doesn’t look like me,” he says haltingly. The good feeling he’d had a second ago when looking at Steve flees, and suddenly he feels like he’s on shaky ground again, unsteady as a newborn foal. For a moment, before, he’d felt sure of a few things, had felt the pieces falling into place. But now… “This isn’t what I look like.” He’s looking at Bucky, he’s looking at the Winter Soldier, he’s looking at—

Steve reaches over and covers Barnes’s hand with his, and gives his fingers a reassuring squeeze as if he can hear him getting lost in his own head. “I draw what I see, Buck,” he says with finality.

Not knowing what to say, Barnes bites the inside of his cheek and doesn’t answer. He stares down at the sketch until the lines start to blur and lose meaning.

For what seems like the thousandth time in the last twenty-four hours, he turns the page.

There are more and more pictures of… of him, of this man who might be someone else, might never be Bucky again. Some of them are studies of his arm on its own, every scuff and scratch rendered in hyperrealistic detail. Others are just his face, a quarter profile with his hair hiding most of his features. Barnes makes a soft sound in his throat and closes the book.

He hears Steve shuffle closer to him, feels the mattress dip, and Barnes looks up to meet his eyes. They’re very blue, even in the sallow light of the bedside lamp, and Steve is watching him closely, with a cautious kind of hope. It’s harder to tell whether he’s blushing, but from the way Steve wrinkles his nose slightly, Barnes bets he’s redder than a tomato.

He wishes he were a big enough guy to tell Steve he should never be embarrassed of his talent; artistically, these are beautiful pieces. It’s just that Barnes doesn’t think much of himself as a subject. If Steve were to draw the real him, it’d probably come out looking more like some kind of freakshow Picasso rendering, not these sketches of a sad-eyed young man dead before his time.

“You... draw what you _want_ to see,” he says, hoping it comes out gentle rather than as a reprimand. “You maybe think the guy you’re drawing is the same as the one in front of you, but it’s not.”

Steve shrugs. “I dunno, Buck,” he says softly. Almost distractedly, he reaches out to push an escaped lock of hair behind Barnes’s ear, the touch lingering, and Barnes can practically feel how badly Steve wants himself to be believed, taken to heart. “I mean, I’m no expert or anything, but I spent enough of my life starin’ at your ugly mug to know a little bit on the subject.”

Then he smiles, or tries to smile, and it looks hollow. Like he, too, is realizing that, while they finally might’ve been able to pull their heads out of their asses about how they feel, there’s a hell of a lot more ground they’ve yet to cover. Together. Separately. Barnes feels a twinge of doubt at how many more times Steve is going to be able to stomach taking one step forward, eighteen back.

“Not an expert, huh?”

Barnes attempts to play along, plasters that smug old grin on his face, even if it feels as broken as Steve looks. It’s fooling no one, he knows that, but he smiles anyway, because smiling for the sake of someone else’s happiness isn’t the same thing as being dishonest.

He hooks his hand around the back of Steve’s neck and draws him down, covers himself with him like a blanket. The weight of his a comfort, a quiet reminder of better things—things Barnes can try to hold on to. And, Christ, how he tries.

“What’s your _expert_ opinion, then, wise guy?” he murmurs in Steve’s ear.

Almost shyly, Steve bites his lip and props himself up on his forearms. Despite his blush, there’s a glint in his eyes that tells Barnes he recognizes the taunt for the invitation it is, though it’s far more likely, in point of fact, that Steve isn’t fooled by the ploy at all. He never is. He just recognizes Barnes’s vulnerability and his fear for what they are, and rolls up his sleeves like he’s ready to take on all his many demons singlehandedly. More and more lately, Barnes is losing the resolve to tell him it’s a fool’s errand.

Distraction—a welcome one—comes in the form of Steve trailing his lips up Barnes’s cheek and ending at his earlobe, which he gently catches between his teeth. It’s a sweet little sting, barely anything, and Barnes hisses his approval, hips canting up of their own volition.

“You got this scar here,” Steve whispers as he noses behind his ear. “And another here.” This time, his lips linger against Barnes’s stubbly jaw for a brief, sucking kiss, but then, like he can’t resist, he finds the warm skin of his throat and mouths at it until Barnes shudders, tilting his head back for more.

He didn’t even know he could whine like that until Steve pulls away.

“Both you got during fights,” continues Steve. “Trying to save my dumb ass even when I said I didn’t need help.” He touches his lips to Barnes’s forehead next, just above his right eyebrow. “This one too.”

“You don’t have any left,” says Barnes, reaching out to thumb at Steve’s lip, which was bloodied on more than one occasion that he remembers. He doesn’t really understand why whatever serum they gave Steve differs from what Zola experimented on him with, but Steve’s remained as flawless as a marble statue, history erased from his skin. Barnes has Steve’s strength and accelerated healing, but his body has become progressively more littered with reminders of all the times he’s bled over the years.

“Good thing I got yours to remember them by,” Steve mutters as he continues down.

He kisses over the scar on Barnes’s right shoulder, product of another childhood fight, and then, without warning, pushes his right arm up and holds it flat against the mattress. There’s a longish scar on the inside of his elbow that causes a full-body shiver to go through Barnes when Steve licks it, tongue hot and smooth against his skin.

He pulls back. “Accident from when you worked on the docks.” So much red, clearly visible now, suffuses his cheeks that Barnes wants to touch them to see if they’d be hot under his fingers. If he’s honest, it turns Barnes’s crank that not even Steve’s most earnest attempts at seduction are any match for his bashfulness; it’s an odd mix of endearing and sexy that couldn’t be more _Steve_ if he tried.

“I don’t remember that story,” Barnes lies, unashamed, keen for Steve to keep at it. He pets his hair and prompts, “Tell me?”

Steve laughs up at him like his bullshit detector is far from malfunctioning yet, but doesn’t call Barnes on it like they both know he could. “I thought you were gonna lose your arm,” he says patiently. “We had such a row after that about you quitting. You did, eventually, but then you went and got yourself drafted instead.”

Barnes doesn’t think the brittleness that creeps into Steve’s voice is imagined, but rather than dwelling on it, Steve continues on and kisses a newer mark that intersects with the bigger scar at the top.

“That one’s new,” he says, meaning _new to me_ , but Barnes knows what it is.

“Mission. Argentina,” he offers. “It was… early on. Hadn’t been in the field much before then. I tried to deflect a blade with my arm and it didn’t work so well.”

There isn’t any emotion in Barnes’s voice as he says it, at least not that he’s aware of, but Steve pauses and looks up at him. Hesitates over a question he obviously wants to ask.

“Spit it out,” says Barnes.

Strangely, Steve grimaces. “Were you ever… afraid, beforehand?”

This is a new topic for them, in a way. Barnes remembers how Steve and Bucky used to talk before the Commandos would set out on missions, confiding their fears in one another. It got easier, after a while, but in the beginning, Steve never hid his insecurities or pretended, with Bucky, to be confident when he wasn’t. Super strength notwithstanding, he’d been a green, untested and untrained kid suddenly in charge of his own squad. Bucky had already been forced to grow into a hardened soldier by then. So when Steve asks the question, Barnes knows it isn’t to belittle him.

“I… still had some vague recollection of who I was, at the start,” he says slowly. He keeps his voice very, very neutral. “I felt afraid sometimes, back then. I was sloppy and inefficient until my handlers figured out how to hone my performance in the field. Later, I didn’t remember who I should be afraid for—the Soldier didn’t have much need for, uh, emotions.” _You felt nothing_ , Barnes corrects himself harshly, and he has to flex the fingers of his left hand a few times to remind himself he has the control, now.“My personal safety was less of a concern than what would happen if I failed.”

Predictably, Steve goes quiet at that, though he keeps running his thumb back and forth across that scar on Barnes’s arm. It’s not the worst one he has. There are marks on his back that he didn’t get through any mission, and he resolves not to talk about those yet, not even if Steve asks. It’s bound to hurt only one of them, and Barnes ran out of tears to shed for himself a long time ago.

But the silence is unsettling, after a few moments. “I remembered how to feel afraid for your life,” he tries, only half-defensive. “That meant something.”

In apology, Steve kisses a spot on Barnes’s chest, next to where the metal joins with his skin, but he’s angry; Barnes can feel it. Not at him, but a low, simmering kind of upset that bleeds into his touch when he discovers another HYDRA-era scar that travels from the side of Barnes’s pectoral up into his armpit. Steve presses his lips there, hard, then scrapes his teeth against it as though he wants to scratch it out from Barnes’s skin. There’s so much that goes unspoken in that one pain-filled gesture that Barnes arches his back, pushing himself against Steve’s mouth like he’d let him gouge the marks off him if he could.

A question lingers in the possessive bite Steve lays upon Barnes’s nipple; for a second, he has to remind himself how to talk instead of writhing there, incoherent and greedy for more. “Fuck,” he barks out. Then: “Okay, fuck, Ukraine. Bad intel. Target had a hidden blade, knew what he was doing.”

Barnes bites his lip when Steve flicks his gaze up, meets his eyes. “I’d ask if you got him back for that, but I think I already know the answer,” he says blandly.

“So just keep going,” Barnes suggests instead, because whatever Steve is imagining, it’s probably worse. His throat feels too tight and he doesn’t think he wants Steve to see all these parts of him, but he doesn’t want this moment to end and he’s sick of hiding.

Steve smiles up at him, unsure. “Yeah?”

Barnes nods jerkily and resists the urge to push his head down, but he does splay his fingers over another prominent scar toward the bottom of his ribcage, one he thinks Steve will recognize. “Yeah. I mean, not like there ain’t plenty more where that came from. We could be here all day.” If Steve is really planning to catalogue all his scars this way, Barnes might as well declare himself a dead man now.  

Obligingly, Steve follows his hand to the decades-old line of white scar tissue over his spleen. Nuzzles the skin until Barnes cards his fingers through Steve’s hair imploringly. He has no idea where they’re going with this, but the last thing he’s inclined to do is complain, Steve lighting up one part of him after another like a city at dusk, streetlamps blazing to life one at a time.

“I remember this one. You fell out of that tree in Prospect Park,” Steve says, the exasperation clear in his words even now, eighty-odd years not enough to forgive that particular incident. Barnes chuckles shakily, because he remembers too. It’d been a dare, and he’d landed on a rock, painfully, broke a rib and split the flesh almost down to the bone. The whole time he’d worried himself even sicker over Steve, who’d gone so pale Barnes thought he might be having a heart attack. They’d been twelve.

“I thought your ma was gonna kill me after she finished fixing me up,” he says, and feels Steve snort a laugh against his side.

“She’d’ve had to get in line. You scared me half to death that day. And half a million other days after that.”

He feels Steve trace, with his fingers, the edge of another scar farther down, to the left of his groin. Barnes should brace himself, because all evidence indicates Steve isn’t done exploring, isn’t done _torturing_ him, but it’s moot.

Steve leaves a trail of twitching abdominal muscles in his wake as he noses his way down Barnes’s stomach, the sensation ticklish as he brushes against the hair below his navel. Not wanting to yank Steve’s hair, Barnes curls his metal hand into the bedsheets instead and twists them around his fist until some semblance of control has returned to him.

“What’s this one from?” asks Steve, pressing the words into his skin. His voice vibrates through Barnes’s belly, spreading warmth everywhere. “I don’t remember it. ’Nother mission?”

Only about an inch shows above his jeans, but the raised skin is jagged, proof that battlefield sutures were meant to be effective, not pretty. Shrapnel injury. There’s enough ugly left behind from Bucky’s life too. But the way Steve says “I don’t remember it” is so toe-curlingly possessive that Barnes gets a drunk, giddy feeling off it.

He gives a quick, negatory jerk of his head in answer to Steve’s question, then squirms as Steve begins to unbutton his jeans and lower the fly.

“Jesus, Steve. _Really_?” he gasps, because he’s a whole lotta naked under there in a way that doesn’t only have to do with his skin. It’d be awfully dense to think Steve isn’t aware exactly how much this little show-and-tell has been affecting him, but. They keep this up, and Barnes won’t be able to string a sentence together pretty soon. He already feels like he’s on a hair trigger, just from Steve touching him.

“I want to see,” Steve answers stubbornly. He peels the edges of Barnes’s waistband down over the jut of his hips. It’s not enough to expose him fully, but his goddamn fingers are at the edge of Barnes’s pubic hair, teasing, and Barnes feels hyperconscious of how hard he is beneath the denim, just inches from Steve’s face. If one or both of them wasn’t ready to make this leap earlier, Steve’s making one hell of a statement to the contrary now.

It’s too much to try to keep it together while looking at Steve’s mouth so close to where Barnes could really, really use it right now. He tips his head back against the pillow and squeezes his eyes shut, forcing out, “What you want is to drive me insane.”

At that, Steve makes what sounds suspiciously like a breathy giggle. “Maybe that too.”

Barnes is prepared, sort of, when Steve seals his mouth against the scar and sucks hard enough to draw all the blood up to the surrounding skin. It makes Barnes keen helplessly, feeling like he’s unravelling at the seams and not inclined to fight it, and he hears himself make a noise of protest when Steve detaches his lips with a mildly obscene _pop._

“So where’d you get it?” he asks breathlessly

Barnes tries to kick out at him him, petulant, and is unsurprised when Steve holds him still with his usual frightening level of efficiency, pinning his legs.

“Sweet Christ, you’re relentless,” Barnes grumbles. As though he has a choice; Steve will probably keep working him over until he breaks and spills everything. He sighs dramatically, like his dick isn’t aching to be the next thing Steve lavishes his attention on. “Occupied France, pal, since you’re so damn curious. Guess it’s my dumb luck I didn’t lose my nuts that day. Still hurt like a bitch, though.”

The lift of Steve’s eyebrows spells out surprise—he probably expected some new story about a HYDRA mission gone awry, not something he might’ve known about if Bucky had cared to tell him—but it’s just another scar like any of the others, unremarkable out of context. Some days, Barnes can’t tell the difference, and they all tingle the same way under Steve’s mouth.

Humour sparkles in Steve’s eyes as he sits back, looking entirely too satisfied with himself. He straddles Barnes’s hips like some kind of wet dream come to life,  running shorts straining over his prominent erection and the muscles of his thighs. Steve’s just full of surprises, Barnes thinks—for a good Catholic boy and a virgin to boot, he could try to look a tad more abashed.

Aware that he’s got the full brunt of Barnes’s attention, Steve grins at him, face pink all the way up along his cheekbones, into his hair.

“I don’t buy it when you say there’s nothing left of Bucky in you,” he says in a solemn voice. Like Barnes might’ve forgotten they’re there, Steve touches his scars again—the visible ones, anyway. “Look, he’s left his mark everywhere—I don’t see just one life written out here. They couldn’t erase that guy if they spent the rest of eternity trying.” Mouth twitching, Steve adds, “If they had, I wouldn’t still waste so much time not knowing whether I want to deck you or kiss you. And if you weren’t who you are now, maybe I’d never have gotten to.”

Terribly, Barnes’s throat wants to close up at that. Voice tight, he asks, “What, deck me? Pretty sure you did your fare share of that, even before.”

He shivers when Steve continues to run his fingers down his chest, nails scraping through the hair, making him suck in a breath when his nipples get the same treatment. “I don’t want to deck you right now.”

“Is that a fact?”

“It is.” Steve bites his lip around a smile and then circles Barnes’s navel with his thumb. “So they’re okay now, though, right?”

Barnes frowns. “Huh?” He’s positive he missed a segue somewhere, distracted by the fingers now slowly tickling the crest of his hipbones.

“Your nuts.” Steve’s shoulders shake with silent laughter. “They doin’ alright?”

“My—” It takes a moment. Then Barnes groans, realizing. For a second he almost forgot Steve has the worst sense of humour on the planet. “Hey, maybe you should check. Just in case.” He curls his lip up and adds, “Might need both hands, though.”

All Steve does is huff in amusement, and Barnes opens his mouth to tell him to fuck off, next, but what comes out is a moan when Steve meanders his hand lower and cups his large, warm palm over the obvious line of Barnes’s erection, arcing to the right of his undone fly. There’s nothing coy about his touch, and the knowing look in his eyes, the way he sucks his bottom lip between his teeth, sends such a jolt of need down Barnes’s spine that he almost arches right off the bed. A frankly embarrassing whimper escapes him when Steve presses down and rubs him through his jeans with the butt of his palm, fingers pressing up and behind his balls until Barnes sees stars.

Steve hums his approval with a quiet burr of sound. “They feel alright to me,” he murmurs, and Barnes, fed up to here with the lack of skin on skin and Steve being generally terrible, disentangles a hand from the bedsheets and slides it up the split leg of Steve’s shorts, wrapping his fingers around his bare flesh and giving the hard length of him a retaliatory stroke. Steve chokes out a low, gratifying moan, and his hips buck involuntarily against Barnes’s hand.

“You’re a bastard,” Barnes informs him roughly, grinning despite himself when the most Steve can muster in response is a surprised chuckle.

He lets go of Barnes long enough to hook his fingers into the belt loops of his jeans and pull them farther down, freeing him to the air, and Barnes tilts his hips up to help. The comically wide-eyed look Steve gets when Barnes circles his metal hand around his own dick is worth any amount of cruel and unusual punishment he might throw at him in the future.

“Here you convinced me you had some profound philosophical point to make, and meanwhile you just wanted to get in my pants,” he teases.

“I’ve always wanted to get in your pants, Buck,” Steve chirps back, though his breath hitches as Barnes continues to stroke them both without hurry, twisting his fist smoothly on the upstroke on a way that has Steve’s head falling back on an openmouthed gasp. “That’s old news.”

Barnes rolls his eyes but lets go of himself—and Steve—in order to push Steve’s shorts down beneath the swell of his ass. He makes an appreciative whistle, because Steve might be one of the few people more perfect in the flesh than in fantasy.

“Get down here,” he commands, remembering how much Steve had liked it before, putting Barnes in charge, and he’s willing to bet Captain America won’t mind if he goes a little bossy on him now.

Sure enough, Steve ducks down to kiss him hungrily, eager; he pants into his open mouth before he slants his lips elsewhere, down Barnes’s neck to his shoulder until he reaches the ugly web of scars, kisses them too, so gently Barnes almost can’t feel it. They really could be here for hours, counting all the marks on his body this way, even if Barnes would rather spend the time worshipping the things he loves about Steve rather than what he hates about himself. But Steve kisses him there like this is the most important, and not just because it’s the one wound they’re least able to forget.

“Fuck, Stevie,” Barnes curses softly. He palms the back of Steve’s head and draws him upward again, guides their mouths back together even as he stretches the fingers of his other hand around them both, a little awkward because he has to get his arm trapped between them, but so, so perfect.

A gloriously lost noise passes from Steve’s mouth into Barnes’s, and he thrusts himself into that grip, keeping their bodies pressed together. The friction of flesh on flesh is heady.

Barnes thinks he could spend forever doing this, feeling how soft and pliant Steve’s lips are to make up for the decades of not knowing, listening to Steve’s unabashed, greedy noises, the sounds of him letting go. He fucks up into Barnes’s fist over and over as he chases release; the headboard rattles with the force of them moving against each other.

When Steve goes rigid against him, coming into Barnes’s hand with a soft, surprised cry, the sound alone, the way Steve kisses him more desperately, messily,  pushes Barnes over the edge next. It’s his name on Barnes’s lips, grateful, and for the first time in a long while, happy. He kisses Steve back with nothing to lose and no fear.

For a few minutes after, Steve goes boneless, his bulk draped over Barnes like an exceptionally heavy limp noodle. Eventually, he rolls off to the side, starfishing out over the bed as he catches his breath, but Steve finds Barnes’s hand with his own and doesn’t let go. His face is lit up with the biggest, goofiest smile Barnes has ever seen. It’s a good look on him, the grin of the newly initiated. The force of his joy shakes a laugh out of Barnes despite himself.

Steve notices, but doesn’t for a second look embarrassed. “What?”

“Nothin’.” Perversely, Barnes is the one who blushes. “You just look so goddamned chipper.”

“Picked up on that, huh?” Steve wrinkles his nose a little when he shucks off his shorts the rest of the way and uses them to wipe the spunk off his stomach, but if anything, that just makes him look more well-fucked. “C’mere,” he says, rolling his head to look at Barnes fondly, and stretches out an arm.

Barnes follows suit in removing his jeans, but then he does as bidden, scooting over to lie on top of Steve and propping himself up against his chest. Like a neanderthal, he digs his elbows in just because he can. But rather than looking annoyed, Steve hangs his head over the side of the bed and grins, laughing softly when Barnes bites at his chin. He works his fingers into the hair at Barnes’s nape and digs in beneath the ponytail, where the right pressure can make Barnes want to purr like a cat.

“So that’s what all the fuss is about,” says Steve, wiggling a little against the mattress like he’s just rediscovered his own body. “I’ve been missing out.”

“That wasn’t even the main event,” Barnes counters with a laugh. “You got plenty to learn still, kid.”

Steve ignores the taunt. He doesn’t even bother to sound mocking when he says, “Guess you’ll have to be the one to teach me, old man.”

The silence that falls between them is easy, something Barnes doesn’t think he’s either ever experienced or remembered after sex, and he loses a few minutes just watching the play of moonlight on Steve’s face through the window while Steve continues to play with his hair, otherwise unmoving. He’s starting to doze off when he feels Steve nudge him in the ribs.

Apropos of nothing, Steve asks, “Hey, you see that?”

Barnes frowns in confusion and peers down at him, ready to ask the question, but Steve is already one step ahead of him and gestures vaguely at the sky. Or not just the sky, Barnes realizes as he glances up out the window.

“What, you mean the moon, or the Eiffel Tower?” he answers, and only grins when Steve digs his fingers into his scalp in admonition. “Yeah, dumbass, I see the moon. What of it?”

“You’re such a putz,” Steve mutters, but he slings his other arm around Barnes’s shoulders anyway and squeezes him a little.

Experimentally, Barnes curls his own arm around Steve’s waist, and it might not be the most comfortable thing, being hugged by an unforgiving metal limb, but from the way Steve continues to smile contentedly, gaze still trained out the window, he doesn’t mind.

“I read this thing recently online,” he says. “Earlier, you asked about the moon, right? Said how you thought it looked different than you thought it should. I just remembered. You weren’t far off base. They say the moon is moving away from the earth an inch and a half each year. Just, like, drifting farther and farther off into space. It’s twelve feet farther away now than it was when we were born.”

Barnes arches an eyebrow, letting the non sequitur go because he’d kind of like to hear Steve’s point. He dutifully turns his gaze back to the sky. It makes him a little sad, to think this is just another thing lost to a time that’s past, gone forever, but at the same time, it’s reassuring to know he hasn’t gone insane, not completely. Even more reassuring is the fact that he’s not the only one to have given this some thought.

“Doesn’t it make you crazy,” he murmurs. “That everything—everything—has changed. There’s nothing left. Not even the goddamned moon, apparently.”

Steve nods, but it’s a considering kind of nod, genial but not completely agreeing. “I’ve had to accept that nothing the same as it was seventy years ago,” he says. “For a while, it made me question everything, what I was doing here.”

Maybe looking out the window upside-down is giving him a head rush, because he nudges Barnes off him and then rolls onto his front, though he’s immediately back with an arm around Barnes’s shoulders, pressing a kiss into his hair and tugging their bodies as close together as they can get. Barnes ends up half-trapped under him, but doesn’t care. Holy Christ, it’s shocking how much he doesn’t care, because nothing has ever made him feel safer than he does at this exact moment.

“Then what?” he asks.

Steve looks at him then, really looks, and Barnes can’t help but meet his eyes, finding there’s a lot more he’d rather be looking at lying right next to him than out the window. “Someone I trust to know what they’re talking about once told me none of us can go back,” answers Steve. “Said that all we can do is our best, and that sometimes that just means starting over.”

The smile Barnes tries to give him feels mighty tremulous, even to him. He knows he’s not convincing anyone, and anyway, the bravado wouldn’t come at a moment like this if he tried. “Even that might be too much to ask, Steve,” he admits, because it’s hard to lie when you’re naked next to the man you might love more than anything, sharing secrets in the dark. “Clean slate, everything forgotten? I don’t know if I got it in me.”

“Then you do what you can. It’s enough.” Steve’s expression has lost some of its earlier giddiness, but it’s soft, affectionate, and he leans in to press his face against Barnes’s cheek, speaking into his skin in a way that vibrates pleasantly. “I’ve changed too, Buck. I don’t think I’d know how to love you this much if I hadn’t, if things didn’t happen exactly the way they did.”

The plainness of his words could crack Barnes in two; some kind of awful sound crawls its way out of his throat, and he struggles with what to do with himself, wanting to bury his head in the comforter so Steve can’t see what’s going on with his face.

“You make it sound so fucking easy,” he says, because he feels he has to; _someone_ has to, before Steve manages to convince either one of them this is the last time they’ll have to have this conversation, that they’ll forget what it feels like to be heartbroken. That’s not how it works. Not by a long shot.

His voice gets louder, a bit higher as he starts to lose the fight against his own panic, the dark stuff that mostly only has free rein at night when he’s asleep. No wonder he sleeps alone; he doesn’t usually have to navigate this disorienting spirals with Steve watching, seeing him stumble and fall and not always right himself. “There’s gonna be bad days, you know. Sure, we’ll pretend things are hunky-dory just ’cause we say some nice words, maybe share a bed, fuck each other silly to make up for the lost time. But I’m still gonna wake up not knowing my ass from my elbows sometimes. I’ll forget all that shit you just told me about the moon, Stevie. I’ll probably forget it a hundred fucking times before it sinks in, if it ever sinks in.”

“Then I’ll remind you as many times as it takes,” Steve counters calmly, though his hold on Barnes’s body is firm as ever, still grounding. “The moon looks different, but it’s still the moon.” He swallows before adding, “Don’t mean I’m not as stupid about you now as I was then.”

Something shatters in Barnes’s chest so powerfully that he almost loses his voice and can’t find it again. He sounds like he’s swallowed razor wire when he chokes out, “I thought we were talking about the moon.”

Steve doesn’t miss a beat. “You know I wasn’t.”

This would be the time, thinks Barnes, to pull Steve in for a kiss, to taste the heat of his mouth with his mouth, kiss him until he feels like he’s drowning and can’t think of anything else, but what he needs now, more, is a both a lot more complicated and a lot simpler than that.

He presses his face against Steve’s shoulder until the vision behind his eyelids is nothing but exploding black stars. Steve holds him back, and he doesn’t, not for a second, let go.

“Then talk to me about the goddamned moon,” he says, words mumbled against Steve’s flesh. They’re sticky and sorely in need of a shower, a proper night’s sleep, but right now, it’s easier to let the moment carry him, let the low, even sound of Steve’s voice do the rest. Barnes knows when to pick his battles, and this whole night, the past whole _day_ , is going to throw him for one hell of a loop later. He can choose to forget about it for now.

A nudge against his chin makes him lift his head up, but it’s Steve, of course, leaning in for a kiss, and if Barnes returns it a bit desperately, Steve doesn’t refuse him that, doesn’t leave him wanting.

“We can talk about the moon as much as you want,” he says against Barnes’s lips, and sighs, not unhappily. For a given value of normal, it might just be the most comforting sound he’s heard in a long, long while. And when Steve smiles, the shape of his lips is something Barnes can feel until he thinks he might be smiling too. “If it helps, I’ll tell you as many times as you need.”

 

 

**fin.**


End file.
